Man Bolada Wiye

The love I tied my heart to in my tender young years,
in love with you…
Tears and smiles, I took them all gladly,
in love with you…

From a country far away I call out to you in the lovely evening,
I wrote these lines of song to rub away the loneliness,
Filling my heart with everything I wish for, O cool breeze,
May my thoughts be caught up in that gentle wind…

The love we tied hand in hand is still there in my memory,
Left alone like this inside a fairy-tale thought,
Filling my heart with everything I wish for, O cool breeze,
Someday we will meet again, my dear one…

In my tender young years…

A man is sitting far from home in the evening, thinking about the girl he fell in love with when he was young, and he starts writing a song because there is nobody there to talk to. That is the whole situation of this one. He never says which country he is in or why he left, and he does not need to. Anyone who has been away from Sri Lanka, working or studying somewhere cold, knows that particular hour when the day is over and the missing starts.

He calls the love “බොලද වියේ” love, the love of his naive years, and he means it kindly. It was the first one, before he knew anything, and it came with tears as well as laughter. He says he took both gladly. That line does a lot of quiet work, because a man who is still counting the tears as something he was happy to receive has clearly not moved on from her at all.

The breeze is the heart of the song. He fills his mind with everything he wishes for and then hands it to the cool evening wind, hoping his thoughts get caught up in it and carried to her. Sinhala poetry has done this for centuries, sending a message through a bird or a cloud or the wind because the distance is too great to cross yourself, and the sandesha poems built whole works out of that idea. Here it is one man on a balcony somewhere abroad, using the same old trick, and the wind is the only thing he has that can travel freely between the two of them.

He calls the memory of holding her hand a “සුරංඟනා සිතිවිල්ල”, a fairy thought, which admits how far away it now feels. It has turned into something out of a story rather than something that happened. The song ends with the one line he is holding onto, that they will meet again someday, and he does not name a date because there is not one. What is left is a man singing to a breeze and choosing to believe it reaches her.